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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22995574">Red Queen, White Knight</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad'>Gammarad</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Writing Rainbow Works [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Advanced Applied Mathematics, Chess, F/M, Jury-Rigged Solution, Music, Science Fiction, Speculative Physics</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 07:54:39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,199</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22995574</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A mundane commuter transport between worlds is sabotaged. Fortunately a couple of the passengers have skills that just might be able to save everyone aboard.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Mathematician/Musician</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Writing Rainbow Works [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1558441</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Writing Rainbow Red</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Red Queen, White Knight</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/gifts">primeideal</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The inter-world transport capsule made its way to Issingrail just as it did every week. Artemy played a snippet of melody on his portable keyboard, the headphones he wore ensuring the sound did not bother his fellow commuters. The bench seat was comfortable and the ride so smooth that he had not needed to put his seatbelt on.</p><p>Travel from one world to another via the Tubes was routine, these days, as impossibly fast as incomprehensible-to-ordinary-people technological magic could make it. Artemy still thought it was cool. Almost as cool as getting the gig as keyboard player for the Pokos, the top ravepop band in Issingrail. </p><p>Artemy was fluent in Anglisig and Hanyou as well as his native Eestikeelt. Despite his ear for languages, he pursued a career in music beyond everything else. He had been very successful, especially for a recent graduate from the renowned but very easygoing musical institute that was Eesti Muuskia on Maa. Thousands graduated there every year. Few had careers take off the way Artemy's seemed to be doing. </p><p>His clear eyes and stylishly wavy hair, and the expressiveness of his face may have been part of the reason for his success. The rest was down to constant practice, inescapable inspiration. Anything beautiful or strange or curious that he saw brought music spiraling into his mind, though he was often afraid he did not see enough strange sights to last in the extraordinarily competitive musical attention market. </p><p>An announcement echoed through the passenger section where Artemy sat. Whatever language it had been made in he did not know well enough to understand it through the music in his earphones and the poor quality of sound. He took out his earphones in time to hear it repeat in Anglisig. "Will any passenger with chess rating between 1600 and 2000 please report to the nearest conductor." That was strange.</p><p>No, it was more than strange, it was dangerous. Artemy heard his pulse in his ears as voices rose around him in alarm. Not so ordinary a commute after all. His mouth went dry as he thought about all the things that might have gone wrong. Things he had thought only happened in entertainments or maybe in capsules traveling between the <i>dangerous</i> worlds. </p><p>His world, Maa, was safe, had been peaceful for generations with no overcrowding or environmental decline, and Issingrail was even safer, sparsely populated by the wealthy and bored, looking for excitement in the form of celebrities and meaning in the form of research into the realities. Not a route where revolutionaries or anarchists would think to strike.</p><p>But something had happened, it must be. One of the drivers' scheduled opponents had dropped out. The transport might stall if a substitute were not found among the passengers. He looked around and seeing no one volunteering, Artemy nerved himself and stood, his keyboard under his arm. </p><p>A conductor hurried to his side. This was one of the new models, silvery with small glowing insets of blue and orange in their head like luminescent cloisonne. "What is your chess rating, honored passenger?" the conductor asked.</p><p>"1760," Artemy said. He was a good player, but did not devote much effort to keeping current. The last tournament he had taken part in, he had been eliminated in the second round by a lower-seeded player -- who had made it to the semi-finals, so Artemy didn't feel too bad.</p><p>"Please follow me." The conductor spun and rolled to the dark archway connecting the passenger compartment to the crew compartment ahead. Total absence of light surrounded Artemy as he passed through into a well-lit space that made him squint. </p><p>There was the chess match on the instrumented board. At first Artemy only noted the position, a weak one for the woman in yellow who played white. There was a furrow between her brows as she chose her next move. A glow lit up the line that she had moved the piece along, gleaming aqua; the board was already criss-crossed with such lines, each revealing where the pieces had moved in past turns, the brightest lines the most recent moves. </p><p>A higher-rated player could recreate the entire game in his mind's eye from such a sight. Artemy barely could run it back three moves before he lost track. </p><p>The conductor led him around the players. When he got to the other side of the board, he stopped still. Catching sight of the red player's face, Artemy forgot everything else; a song played in his imagination, a melody her face made him hear, and he tried to memorize it, to set it down before it slipped away. It was the most beautiful music he'd never heard.</p><p>"Take a seat, be ready when the game ends," the conductor said. Artemy sat heavily, eyes fixed on the game and on the player who moved the red pieces. His fingers moved over the keyboard, recording the notes of the melody.</p><p>He knew the story of these games as well as any chess player at his level. There was nothing about space travel that specifically required chess; it had been chosen as a well known strategy game that had enough variety of pieces and sufficiently expert players to work well to the requirements. </p><p>What he didn't understand, what hardly anyone really understood, was the underlying theory, or rather, theories, plural. There were four of them; each explained everything, was one of the unified theories physics had long sought before their near-simultaneous discovery, and yet it was impossible to prove one over the other. </p><p>They had contradictory predictions. This was not unprecedented. Photons had been found to be both particles and waves more than a century earlier. Quantum physics had been based on that duality. Now a higher order with similar implications, a quadrality; there were four types of basic reality, and whichever one you tested for first, you got. </p><p>None of the theories by itself permitted faster than light travel. The core discovery that permitted it was that you could cheat, by changing at will which theory applied, and break the limit. But the change had to be observed, and the right test had to be made at the right time, and it was all octonion math, those strange numbers who could be added and multiplied, subtracted and divided, and yet didn't follow ordinary rules about such things; they weren't commutative or even associative, and Artemy, whose math studies had ended before he even understood the square root of negative one, couldn't even imagine it.</p><p>That was key to why he was here. A player without preconceptions about which physical reality would take precedence was needed. His moves would drive the tests, choose without breaking the system, and the alternatives built into the pawns, rooks, bishops and knights would determine which test was done, or the direction he moved a king or queen. Like octonions, chess moves were neither commutative nor associative. It mattered who went first, which pieces took which others. A pawn could capture a queen if the pawn was in the right place and moved before the queen.</p><p>The woman in yellow tilted her king. She had been checkmated. It was Artemy's turn.</p><p>The board reset. Artemy sat behind the white pieces, lined up in their starting formation. </p><p>"You aren't who I expected," his opponent said in Anglisig. Her face still made him hear music, but he'd managed to jot down the skeleton of the melody while he waited, so he didn't mind letting it simply drift across his consciousness. </p><p>"There was a call to the passengers. Was someone taken ill?" Artemy meant to sound concerned, but he wasn't sure what his voice was doing. It sounded stilted in his ears, awkward, where he'd been fluent in Anglisig for years.</p><p>"I'm Mureen," she said. "Make your opening." The capsule shuddered around them, as if to emphasize the importance of her words to everyone aboard. </p><p>Artemy moved his king's pawn two steps forward. Mureen was the pilot, so he chose the standard opening move, allowing her the greatest leeway. The reason for choosing a chess player with a good but not master level rating was that his play would be predictable, guided by the more expert pilot's game into the form needed to get the capsule where it was going efficiently. </p><p>Erratic and unpredictable playing, whether because the player was new to chess or highly skilled, would slow their progress. No playing at all would leave them all stranded; it was no option to be considered.</p><p>The board lit up with Artemy's move, a silver line connecting the pawn's initial position to its new one. Momentary vertigo made his head spin as his perception veered down and up, as though he were on the board looking up at Mureen from the board. A band snapped out from the chair and went around his chest, holding him securely in place. </p><p>Artemy wasn't sure whether to be grateful as it was the only thing that kept him from falling out of the chair, or intimidated. He hadn't expected to need to be strapped in to play chess. The previous player hadn't been. "It will release if you press there." Mureen gestured to the button labeled "release" in Anglisig and some other language, Banla he thought by its graceful script. </p><p>The next move of the opening the pilot had chosen was obvious, and Artemy was prepared for the dizzy motion of seeing the world from the piece's point of view when he let it go and the move lit up. So strange, but it seemed natural. </p><p>"And what is your name?" she asked as she moved her piece. Artemy watched, but he could see nothing change, no sign of dizziness or disorientation after. Did she not experience it, or was she so accustomed to it that it made no difference, he wondered.</p><p>He gave his name, made his move, swooped in, and back. Yes, he decided, best to be grateful for the strap holding him in place. It would be embarrassing to fall in front of so many people. </p><p>"Artemy, it's my pleasure," Mureen said.  </p><p>As they conversed, they continued trading chess moves. Artemy was quickly getting used to the strangeness of it all. </p><p>"Everyone on the capsule is lucky we both were here," Mureen said. "Think how unfortunate it would have been if all of us had been stranded in the Tubes. It's not even certain we could have been retrieved in time. Commuter capsules only carry ten days of life support supplies, you know." </p><p>He was not sure how she sounded so unruffled as she said things that implied great danger. "Oh, the commuter system is very safe," Artemy said, still barely able to recognize his own words as Anglisig. "There is always a backup pilot and several opponents." </p><p>"Except when they are all taken ill. I imagine it was sabotage." She made a move he hadn't expected. He took time to examine their position, choose from the moves he saw as his best options, plot the next two or three moves ahead if she did what he expected. This took long enough that the capsule started to shake again. Hurriedly he chose and moved his bishop.</p><p>Her knight captured it, and the long-short diagonal lit up, but Artemy was arching his back against the strap. It wasn't actual pain, he realized in a way that felt slow but he knew was not slow at all, it was like being cut away from existence and sudden and shocking though. Had she felt that when he captured her pawn sacrifice? This whole experience was so strange.</p><p>"Both pilots got sick, probably from something they ate. I think the strange feeling when you move a piece is part of the sabotage, too," she answered, and he realized he'd said that out loud about the experience being strange. "It's why all the arranged opponents are ill. Usually it's only a game of chess, I believe."</p><p>Artemy took a too-quick breath, then a slow one. "Aren't you the pilot," he said in confusion.</p><p>"No. I'm a mathematician, on my way to Issingrail to take up a new university post. I know the octonion drive method in chess mostly as a research tool. But both pilots were too sick. Something in their food, maybe. And your predecessor was the last of their opponents to be able to keep playing. She's gone to rest from it all, I believe."</p><p>The commuter trip seemed so much less routine, took on a dangerous cast which surprised Artemy by being more exciting than frightening. He grinned at her. "So we're both new to this, in a way? In the same situation?" He liked that idea. And if they made it through to Issingrail, she wouldn't be leaving with the ship. Perhaps they could have dinner together, or he could send her a ticket to one of his performances. </p><p>The adrenaline carried him through the vertigo of the next few moves, but the nausea sapped it. Something like a migraine was building up behind Artemy's eyes. The position for his next move, he knew this one, he could almost remember what his next move had to be to defend the center of the board... he hesitated over the piece too long, the capsule shook, and his hand knocked over the piece he had meant to move. The shaking intensified. </p><p>"It's getting to you already," Mureen said, voice tinged with worry as it had not been before. </p><p>"I'll be fine," Artemy said as firmly as he could manage. But he was slowly becoming aware that he would not be. He could hardly focus on the game, and he had to or the entire capsule of passengers and crew would never make it to Issingrail, himself and Mureen included.</p><p>But he wasn't fine. He managed to play a few more moves, but his sense of his position and hers was barely adequate, and he knew he was going to lose very soon. He wasn't even playing well enough to keep the ship going at its normal speed. Then, when his queen was captured, a molten spike seemed to travel right through his skull and he went unconscious. </p><p>Artemy woke once for a few seconds unsure where he was, then again, still strapped into the chair, though it had been moved out of the way and a new chair set across the chessboard from Mureen. A conductor offered him a squeeze bottle of water. He took a sip. His mouth tasted foul. There was an older man at the white pieces, holding the heel of his hand against the side of his head as he made his moves. Artemy closed his eyes only to rest for a moment and lost consciousness again.</p><p>The capsule was shaking nonstop when Artemy woke again. His head felt clearer, and his stomach more stable, despite the motion. Mureen stood over him. "We have run out of players," she said softly. </p><p>"I can try again," Artemy said. He desperately didn't want to, but he even more didn't want to be stranded between worlds. </p><p>"We could play until you collapse again," Mureen said, "and then I could ask the conductors bring me a passenger who I can teach the game to, and keep trying." </p><p>"It's the only way we get there, right?"</p><p>"Maybe there's another way. That keyboard you came in here with. You play it, right?"</p><p>Artemy nodded, which was a mistake. His head throbbed at the motion. He moved his pawn, the world yawned before him, and he had to keep his mouth tightly shut against the unsteadiness of his stomach. "Mm hmm," he got out between closed lips, an affirmative sound at least. </p><p>"My research," Mureen began and then stopped. Started again. "Chess isn't the sole way to shift the reality tests, only the best studied and safest. But right now it's not very safe. It'd be worth the risk of an experimental method, if it'd let us go faster, get further before we can't anymore." </p><p>Before Artemy couldn't anymore. He looked at her and wasn't going to risk another nod. "Agreed."</p><p>"So here's what I'm going to do. I'll -- sing. And you play your keyboard and accompany me, but -- don't be creative. Don't try to be arty, you know? Play the most standard thing, all right? Old fashioned and traditional. Because I'm going to be trying to get you to decide on the right notes so your decisions can drive the tests that drive the capsule to Issingrail. Just like the chess game would have."</p><p>He could do that, Artemy thought. Mureen bent down and pulled eight connectors out of the chess board's base. The lights showing the tracks of the chess pieces flickered and went out. </p><p>"Get the keyboard," she said to one of the conductors, who picked it up from the chair Artemy had sat in while he watched the previous chess game and brought it to the unofficial pilot. He watched, eyes squinted because of the headache, but fascinated by the ease with which Mureen opened the keyboard case and inside it, found the adapters she could mesh the connectors to. Decades of standardized connector technology has untold benefits, he thought in a daze.</p><p>She set the keyboard across his knees. "My chess rating isn't even 1400, you know. There's a program that tells the pilot which moves will shift the octonions along which path. That's what I know, which decisions I need to influence you to make. And I've got a program that does the same with music, so... let's see if I can prove my theories are practical." Mureen looked exhausted, but she was smiling, although her smile was too wide to be friendly or comforting. She was exhilarated at the thought of testing her invention, he thought, and smiled back as close as he could come to matching her expression.</p><p>So they sang and played their way to Issingrail. The ship steadied and the speed numbers rose well past where they had been during the chess game, Mureen sang snatches of folk songs from several countries and popular music from even more, Artemy played the melody line of accompaniment to each without the slightest harmonizing or extra, though he kept being tempted. One ad lib couldn't hurt, he would think, but he managed not to anyway. </p><p>He would get himself an apartment on Issingrail, Artemy thought. He wasn't going to want to commute every week anymore after this.</p><p>As the capsule settled into what Artemy hoped was a safe berth in the Issingrail port station, Mureen said in almost a whisper, "The authorities are going to want to interview us. Probably separately. But after that."</p><p>"After that, let's get together and talk about all this, what happened," Artemy agreed. Or he thought that was what she had meant, anyway.</p><p>"Talk, or something." She handed him a card with her contact information. </p><p>Then the crew room started to fill with Issingrail port officers and emergency medical techs. Artemy let himself be checked for injury and taken to hospital for treatment. </p><p>Through all of it, he held onto Mureen's card and the prospect of seeing her again soon.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The math in this story is based on this article in Quanta: <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/">Octonion Math Could Underpin Physics</a></p><p>I was very taken with the infographic about octonions. I'd attempted to use quaternions extensively in certain 3-D programming environments and got myself rather turned around, and this definitely helped me understand why.</p><p>So the math is real, the physics is speculative, and the rest is sci-fi tropes.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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